Is Tampa the new Ft. Sumter?

I guess Glenn Beck did his "oh please don't commit any of the violence I've been urging you to commit for the last year" ass-covering episode just in time.

What was intended to be a town hall discussion on President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal dissolved into a shouting match with shoving and scuffles in Ybor City tonight.
The event brought home to Tampa the recent phenomenon of angry opponents of Obama's proposal disrupting town hall meetings by Democratic members of Congress during the August recess.
This meeting was organized by Democratic state Rep. Betty Reed but was to include comments on the proposal by U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, a strong supporter.
Castor tried to speak for nearly 15 minutes but the crowd drowned her out, chanting, "You work for us,'' "Tyranny, tyranny,'' and "Read the bill." She ultimately left the meeting early, further angering some attendees.
The problems began when a crowd of around 500, many of them recruited to attend by interest groups both for and against the proposal, sought to enter the meeting room. The room, in the offices of the Hillsborough County Children's Board on East Palm Avenue, has a capacity of only about 250.
Several hundred people, mostly opponents, wound up outside or packing a hallway leading into the meeting room. Some scuffled with members of the sponsoring groups who manned the doorway.

The story is a bit misleading in that it blames both sides for the near riot. One group of people came there to discuss health policy and here from their elected representative, many at the behest of the their preferred political party or political action group. The other group was there strictly to shout slogans, disrupt the meeting and prevent reasonable discussion at the behest of those with a vested interest or for political advantage. There is no question as to which group is associated with which political party and blaming both sides is like blaming the bank and the bank robbers.

Not that Beck is the only one to blame, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Mahablog rounds up the usual suspects. One of several groups recruiting and busing people to break up meetings is "American's For Prosperity" - a nasty little conservative mouthpiece for hire group that Desmog blog ran across when they were trying to argue that global warming was a hoax.

Obviously the plutocrats are either worried or getting so overconfident that they cannot be touched, that they aren't even bothering to wipe the fingerprints off the weapons they are using to murder democracy in the United States.

This isn't the first time the right has used mob tactics in recent history, but this time it was regular people inspired by the same hatemongers and professional manipulators behind the "tea-bagger" movement, not a crowd of political aides and party operatives.

In encouraging people to come out and disrupt politcal meetings, a very dangerous line has been crossed here. Is American headed back to the pitched street battles of the early 20th century when the industrial barons of the day hired goons squads to attack and kill trade unionists, break up leftist demonstrations and nearly mounted a military coup?

Big darkness, soon come.

The mustache that walked like a man

John Bolton: Yosemite Sam in a suit or Ned Flander's evil twin -We provide the cartoon picture, you decide.

Mocking the bozos

While they supposedly serve as a recruiting ground for the Yakuza, Japanese bike and hot rod gangs - known as bosozoku (speed tribes) - are not particularly daunting to most westerners. For starters, rather than being the huge, hulking, hairy, leather-clad menaces one associates with North American bike gangs, most of bosozuku are under 25, don't need to shave, ride 250 cc motorbikes or (snicker) scooter and weigh about 120 pounds soaking wet with a brick in each pocket. The pathetic bikes they ride generally are modified to be as loud as possible, something you never need to do with a real motorcycle like a Harley or an Indian or even a large engined Yamaha or Kawasaki. They supposedly do some intimidating for the Yakuza and deal at little meth and have been known to gang up in groups of hundreds and take over small villages or resorts for the weekend, but their main form of menace is to get together in groups of about ten to several dozen and ride down the expressway at super-slow speeds, blocking traffic. Obviously, they are lucky not to have met a road-rage afflicted North American driving a Cadillac. Yet.
They often have silly haircuts and wear what look for all the world like embroidered lab coats and seem more interested most of the time with taking pictures of each other trying to look tough or cool than in causing any actual mayhem. The meanest, toughest ones probably end up as low level Yakuza, some probably end up in the militant right-wing black bus brigades the rest probably are doomed to a life of day labor, sho-chu and pachinko. The average westerner in Japan generally reacts to them with veiled amusement or simple irritation, but the Japanese consider them an absolute Menace to Society on par with cancer, AIDS or drunken U.S. servicemen.
It's about time someone taught those scooter-trash punks a lesson! The cops need to crack down on these damned criminal bike gangs once and for all! People are mad as hell and they aren't going to take it any more! It time for action:

Bosozoku bike gangs in Ginowan called names
Takeshi Kawamura and Ryuhei Yoshimura / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writers
Police and residents in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, have launched a campaign to drive away bosozoku motorcycle and automobile gangs using the epithet "dasaizoku" (uncool gangs) to describe them.
The campaign aims to embarrass bike gang members and encourage them to quit their reckless riding and driving. But will it work?

No. It won't.

This has been another edition of short answers to stupid questions.

Admittedly, Japan has a very different culture and the bosozoku are not exactly the Hell Angels, (they aren't even Hell's Grannies) but unless the goal is to make them laugh too hard to be able to stay on their ridiculous little bikes, this is so not going to work.

Sunday songs and cinema

This Sunday in Second Life we are getting down to Radio Woodshed and watching Bridge on the River Kwai - Join the virtual dance party from 5 pm SLT/8 pm EDT and catch the movie at 7 SLT/10 EDT.

First against the wall when the revolution comes

Stop the presses!

The President had a beer with a professor and a policeman! Why is it that I can't read these stories without this song going through my head?

Meanwhile, back in the American heartland, in the shining city on a hill, there is good news as the the latest minimum wage increase kicked in last week. The federal minimum wage is now $7.25 per hour (about $15,000 a year based on a 40 hr week) Of course some states don't even have minimum wage laws. About 13 percent of the population of the United States lives below the poverty line (set in 2001 at $18,000/year for a family of four).

There are about 45 million americans without health insurance of any kind and millions more with wholly inadequate insurance. Kids are dying of toothache because their family doesn't have the money to take them to a doctor. The current health care proposal in front of congress now is estimated to cost $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over the next ten years and some people oppose it because it would be funded by a one percent increase in income taxes for people making more than $200,000 a year. That's in addition to the roughly 3% income tax hike Obama already has proposed for the top tax bracket, bringing their tax rate to 38%.

Handing over 38% of your taxable income to the government sounds like a lot until I see stories like this:

Bank Bonus Tab: $33 Billion

Nine Lenders That Got U.S. Aid Paid at Least $1 Million Each to 5,000 Employees

By SUSANNE CRAIG and DEBORAH SOLOMON

Nine banks that received government aid money paid out bonuses of nearly $33 billion last year -- including more than $1 million apiece to nearly 5,000 employees -- despite huge losses that plunged the U.S. into economic turmoil.
(snip)
Wall Street has shown little sign of slowing down the pay train this year. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley recently disclosed that they have set aside $11 billion and $6 billion in compensation and benefits, respectively, for their employees so far this year. Goldman's second quarter was among its best ever. Morgan Stanley lost money for its third straight quarter.Goldman and Morgan Stanley declined to
comment on the report.Meanwhile, some big banks that received government bailouts, including Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., are offering handsome pay packages to lure stars. Citigroup -- which received about 25% of the aid going to the nine banks -- has the No. 1 pay recipient. Andrew Hall, who heads Citigroup's energy-trading unit Phibro LLC, received $98.9 million in 2008, according to a government official. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, by comparison, received more than $38 million last year."

Poor Vikram, he's the CEO and he has to struggle along on a paltry $38 million a year.

The U.S. government in the past year has spent about $1.8 trillion on bailing out and proping up the banking industry: $31.1 billion on bank takeovers, $117.9 billion on bailing out AIG, $1.4 trillion on Fed financial rescue efforts including the Bear Stearns bailout effort, $40 on the capital investment in Citigroup and Bank of America, $20.4 billion on the Capital Purchase Program to bail out banks, and another $5 billion in assest guarantees for BoA and Citi. This is money spent, not just money committed or earmarked for bailout programs - those numbers are even higher. And it doesn't include the more than $1 trillion spent on the GM bailout or the stimulus plan or the money spent on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and mortage relief for homeowner facing foreclose. Nope, that $1.8 trillion is just what has been forked over to shore up the banking industry. (figures from here)

And that's just the financial sector payoff. How about the military industrial complex?

They say if you aren't angry, then you aren't paying attention.

People often wonder why the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution were so brutal. How could ordinary French peasants and townsfolk cheer to see people they formerly respected as their "social betters" being marched to guillotine? How could the Bolsheviks be so hardhearted as to machine-gun to death the Tsar and his family, even the young children?


I think I might understand it.

a different kind of pillow talk

Yeah, yeah, I know, "judge not lest ye be judged" and "People who live in glass houses" and all that, but uh.....sometimes it seems like this country is just one big open air freakshow:

Momo, whose real name is Toru Taima, has more than 150 body-pillow covers at home. His current favorite is Karada-chan, a copper-haired sixth grader from the anime “A Direction in the Day After Tomorrow.” She’s fully clothed in the cartoon, but in Momo’s imagination and thus on his pillow cover, she appears naked, her cheeks flushed, her prepubescent nipples hidden by her forearms, her white panties rolled down to her ankles. A translucent square etched onto the pillow cover censors her hairless vagina.
Every night, Karada-chan and at least two other animated preteens, drawn with large pink nipples and exaggerated labia, share a mattress with Momo, one on each side and another on top. “They’re so cute, I can’t stand it,” he said shyly. “It’s like my favorite girl comes to marry me every night. I just can’t stop thinking about them.” When Momo talks about Karada-chan, his mousy face lights up like a kid opening Christmas presents. “Her existence to me is like daughter, younger sister and bride all put into one.” Does he have sex with her? “Yes.” Is he interested in real women? “It’s not like I’m completely uninterested. But the last girl I really liked was hen I was 12 years old.”

And my wife sometimes wonders why I don't want the kids out of my sight in public places. If there was ever a society in dire need of a massive dose of psychotherapy, I'm living in it.

(a hat - tip to Our Man in Abiko)

News sources say the darnedest things

Just a couple of interesting juxtapositions of quotes and information in news stories I noticed today.


First, this attempt to put a good face on things in Afghanistan:

"You look into the eyes of some of the soldiers and they have clearly grown up on this operation, " (Britian's top commander in Afghanistan Brig. Tim) Radford told reporters in London via a video link from Helmand.

Yes, Brigadier - and in the very next paragraph we find out how many of Britain's youth clearly won't be doing any more growing up as a result of this operation.

A total of 22 U.K. soldiers have died in July - many as the result of roadside bombs, and about half of them on missions other than Panther's Claw - raising new questions among the British people about the cost of the eight-year military campaign. Since 2001, 191 British service personnel have died in Afghanistan.

* * * * *

Second, this sort of Libertarian-U.S. Republican approach to social welfare found in Japanese culture:

Toyoki Yoshida, 37, of Yoake no Kai (Daybreak Association), which assists people who are heavily in debt, said: "We've seen many cases of people who grit their teeth and fight on after losing their jobs. However, when these people spend the last of their unemployment benefits and savings, many choose to commit suicide."

It's hard to imagine another country or culture that would see bank bailouts and antirecession measures as a primary way of fighting suicide because killing yourself rather than going on welfare is considered a reasonable thing to do. The quote is from an article that very matter-of-factly points out that the suicide rate is up from last year and may break the record of 34,427 people taking their own lives set in 2003.

* * * * *

And, of course, we can always count on Texas:

According to police, the 33-year-old Sanchez told the responding officers that she was “hearing voices” and that the “devil made her kill” her son – Scott Wesley Buchholtz Sanchez – who was born on June 30.
Chief McManus told reporters the mother confessed to eating parts of the child’s body but declined to give details. Earlier reports from the Associated Press said the mother had eaten the baby’s brains and bit off three of his toes.

Yeah, it wasn't anything scientific like untreated galloping post-partum depression or incipient schizophrenia - the woman who ate part of her own baby admitted that "the devil made her do it." (no offense to Flip Wilson) Thank God the United States doesn't have any kind of crazy Marxist socialist universal health care system that might have helped this woman get the treatment she needed or at least kept her and her baby in the hospital -- all she really needed was a good exorcism! Yep, she was crazy to believe in the devil, not like most of her fellow citizens.

I. Have. No. Words.

Yeah, but if they comb their hair just right, no one will notice it.

James Inhofe (R-Dumbfuckistan) still thinks the birthers have a Very Important Point.

In other news, U.S. President Barack Obama apparently still a U.S. born U.S. citizen from Hawaii which is in the United States.

Pssst! Did you know the United States was still involved in two wars?

'Cause it's hard to waste time on the internet...

When Cordon Bleu dropouts go bad, and a plethora of other diversions that will ensure you never get anything done on time ever again.

Thanks a lot JJ!!!

Canada's New Conservative Government: Getting Things Done For to Canadians

Fellow inkstained wretch Alison brings us up to date on the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik:

Abousfian Abdelrazik spoke out this morning about his exile, his torture, the false charges against him, the harrassment of his dying Canadian wife and her family by CSIS before he returned to Sudan to care for his ailing mother in 2003.
.
He could identify by sight, he told us, the Canadian agents who questioned him while he was in captivity in Sudan, including the one who told him "Sudan will be your Guantanamo" and that he was never coming home.
He describes being interrogated in Sudan in 2008 by Foreign Affairs parliamentary secretary Deepak Obhrai, who questioned him about Osama bin Laden and what he thought of Israel.

Whoa, whoa, whoa - back that up a minute -- did I just read what I thought I read?

"He describes being interrogated in Sudan in 2008 by Foreign Affairs parliamentary secretary Deepak Obhrai, who questioned him about Osama bin Laden and what he thought of Israel.

WTF?

From Deepak Obhria's website:

"Deepak Obhrai was born in Tanzania and attended school in three separate continents: in Tanzania, India and the United Kingdom. He graduated as an Air Traffic Controller in the UK and worked at several airports in East Africa. After immigrating to Canada in 1977, Deepak worked in the accounting department for the City of Calgary before becoming self-employed. He and his wife Neena became owners of a chain of dry-cleaning stores and also formed a company to explore joint venture opportunities in overseas markets."

So was it his experience as an air traffic controller or as a dry-cleaner that made him an expert interrogator? What the in the name of Mata Hari is the parlamentary secretary to the Foreign Minister doing questioning a Canadian citizen about anything? If Mr. Abdelrazik is such a huge threat to our security why wouldn't the public safety minister be the one involved? Or the Justice Minister? What is any politician doing conducting interrogations?

And they don't shed on the rug either

A little something for our friends Dan and Tammy at Jackson Street Books:

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read"
-Groucho Marx

Books I am reading now:

• Nixonland (still dipping into it a bit at a time - a fantastic modern political history of the United States)
• Against the Day (after 18 months-the longest I've ever spent reading any single book-I'm finally nearing the end of this Thomas Pynchon epic.)
• Appaloosa (a nice little western by Robert B. Parker, recently made into a film written and directed by Ed Harris, who stars along with Viggo Mortensen)
• The Rum Diaries (Hunter Thompson's semi-autobiographical novel of expat journo life in Puerto Rico, soon to be a major motion picture)

Books just finished:

• Resolution (Sequel to Appaloosa)
• The Tonto Woman and other stories (great collection of Western short stories by Elmore Leonard, including Three-ten to Yuma, an office discussion of which started me on the whole Western kick recently)

What's on your summer reading list?

Bwahhahahahaha!

Fools, you did not heed the words of the mighty Ming!
Tremble, puny earthlings and click here to watch as I take away your sun!

Attention puny earthlings!

Bow before me, Ming the Merciless, and bend your worthless selves to my will or I will blot out the sun tomorrow at 11 am!

I require all governments of the earth to surrender unconditionally to me and evacuate and cede the following territories to me for my Imperial dominions: New Zealand, Kuai, The Isle of Man, Switzerland, Panama and Baffin Island.

All of the following territories are to be evacuated for use as waste storage sites and all residents are report to the nearest Dominio's Pizza, Foot Locker, Walmart or Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet for induction into my global army of slaves: Texas, Alberta, Australia, Mongolia, Portugal and the Vatican. All national treasuries are to be forfeit to my personal coffers.

Also, two chili dogs with extra onions and jalapenoes, some onion rings (the good ones, not those crappy minced onion ones they sell at Burger King) and a diet coke Big Gulp. One gets a bit peckish ruling over the known galaxy with an iron fist.

Pathetic fools, do not test the patience of Ming!

You have until 10 am tomorrow to comply or feel my icy wrath as I blot out your sun!

Disobey me at your peril puny earthlings! I am Ming the Merciless and I am your master! You will worship me as a god or I shall take away the sun!

One small step...

Frankly I think the Onion headline understates it.

40 years ago, July 20, 1969, humans walked on the Moon. The MOON. Maybe you've seen it? Big yellow thing in the sky? said to hit your eye like a big pizza pie? Yeah, that thing. As a species, we've been there and done that. We went to The Moon.

In the history of human endevour, that is still the big one, our greatest technological achievement. Seriously, the Pyramids - mere sandcastles. The artificial heart - a bit of biomechanical clockwork. Splitting the atom - okay, impressive and dangerous, but also some pretty nasty side effects. The computer and the internet - yeah, just like the human brain, 90% of it is used for porn. Cracking the code and mapping human DNA is going to be a bigger and bigger deal as time goes by, but if you told DaVinci or Newton or Galileo about it, they wouldn't know what you were talking about. If you told them "Len, Issac, Gal - we went to the moon" they would be all "no way! that's fucking amazing! Holy crap, wait until we tell the Pope - he'll freak out!"

I don't mean to disparage the early astronauts: Guys like Yuri Gagarin and the Right Stuff boys were beyond brave - early space travel was a dicey business that involved getting shot into the sky in a box built by the lowest bidders - or the astronauts currently living in the International Space Station, who are still a long way from home. Manned satellites are going to become more and more common and the zero gravity/vacuum enviroment has enormous industrial and scientific potential. But we're talking about the difference between sailing up and down the coast and sailing across the ocean. In orbit, you go round and round the Earth, the Apollo 11 boys actually went someplace. I feel sorrier for Michael Collins than just about anyone - imagine going all that way and having to wait in the car.

All the reasons people invariably give for opposing space exploration - it's too expensive, it's a "waste" of resources, more pressing problems on the ground - are all reasons to go to space. Space exploration costs a fraction of what is spent on the military. The money spent in Iraq probably would have bankrolled a Mars colony. This rock we live on is eventually going to run out of resources, no matter how careful we are. We will eventually use up all the oil, all the iron, all the water - you name it we will run out of it sooner or later, including real estate and elbow room- so we better get out there and find some more. A lot of those more pressing problems are likely to be solved by technological development driven by space exploration and colonization - and if they can't be, it might be nice if humanity had a lifeboat.

40 years ago, we finally proved we didn't need to keep all of humanity's eggs in one increasingly fragile basket. Why no further progress has really been made is anyone's guess. Financial costs have a lot to do with it, but NASA is the rare government effort that has actually made money (You think all those communication satellites were put in orbit for free?). The only reason we don't have permanent manned bases on the moon, launching manned missions to Mars is a lack of political will. We could have done it by the mid 80s or at least the mid 90s if we as a species hadn't been busy squandering money on ways to exterminate ourselves via the nuclear arms race.

So we went to the Moon and all we got was this lousy, soon-to-be-shut-down space shuttle program and the nobody seems that interested in going back at the moment except the Indians and Chinese. We left behind some probes and a couple of golf balls and and worst of all, a plaque with Richard Nixon's name on it. We should at least go back to clean up that kind of embarrasing shit.


There are even people out there whacked out enough to think that Capricorn One was based on a true story and that we never landed on the moon. Their tiny minds just can't handle the idea that his is something humans could have done. I think Buzz "the second man on the moon" Aldrin deals with such critics in the most appropriate way.

And that's the way it was...

Walter Cronkite was a newsman's newsman. His departure from the airwaves in 1980 pretty much ended the heyday of television news (as opposed to today's "infotainment" programming). He was recruited by Edward Murrow after distinguished service as a war correspondent in World War Two. His famous broadcasts on the occasion of the Kennedy assassination and moon landings, his explanation of the Watergate scandal and especially his editorial on the Vietnam War being unwinnable are important pieces of American history. Even the best of the people on CNN today are punks and spokesmodels compared to Walter Cronkite. The only living television newspeople who can hold a candle to his legacy would be Dan Rather and Bill Moyers, both of who will be forever in his shadow. He was "the most trusted man in America" for a damn good reason - he was trustworthy. If Walter Cronkite said it, you knew it was true.

Following is a decent, lengthy interview with Uncle Walter if you can get through the cheesy two minutes of commercials for USC that kick off the video.

Look away, Dixieland

I wonder how many people seen in this series of photos are also somewhere in this series of photos? I also wonder why anyone would celebrate a culture of ignorance, racism, intolerance and stupidity or a history of treason in defence of slavery, but then, I'm not from Dixie.

Stay KKKlassy conservatives

So Palin, who brags about being a mom like she invented it and trots her brood out at every possible opportunity, says that her family is off limits when it comes to political criticism, jokes or satire and the vast majority of the conservative blogosphere agrees, calling a David Letterman a child rapist for making a joke about Caribou Barbie's 18-year-old daughter getting knocked up.

Obama's preteen daughters are apparently a whole different story.

republicans continue to invent own reality

I'd like to offer Sarah Palin the same advice that usually given to people whose abilities don't equal their grand ambitions - don't quit your day job, but I guess it's too late for that.

Now would someone please wake her enabler, her creator, the guy that opened the Pandora's Box of stupid Grandpa and break the news to him gently?

"Oh,I don't think she quit," said Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008 who plucked Palin out of near-obscurity and made her a household name. "I think she changed her priorities." For now, though, Palin isn't detailing those priorities.

Just think, he could have been president now if he'd picked a different running mate.

Get on up and get on down at the Red Zeppelin

DJ Rev.Paperboy will be spinning the virtual stax of wax at the Red Zeppelin on Sunday Night from 5 pm to 7 pm (PDT/SLT) 8 pm to 10 pm (EDT) for your internet listening pleasure, with the glorious people's cinema project presenting High Noon at 7pm/ 10 pm. You can join us in Second Life or watch it on You Tube and crack wise in the comments at your leisure.